Raw material: The production of pathology in Victorian culture.

Abstract

"Raw Material" tracks the intersections in Victorian thinking between pathologies of the material body and problems of material culture by looking at how industrialism informed understandings of disease. Drawing on medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, travel writing, and popular advertising, "Raw Material" shows how Victorian writing about disease formed a political economy of pathology, a rhetoric of physiology that treats disease as a profoundly productive degenerative force. Imagining pathology as a problematic mode of production, something that reduces human flesh to a series of commercial objects, Victorian writers used disease to explore the meaning of corporeality in machine culture. The notion of disease as a coming alive of body as thing--or, conversely, as death by objectification--encoded a problematic of difference, a series of questions about whether, and on what terms, human flesh could be distinguished from other materials. Pathology comprised an absolutely material metaphor, a mechanism for anatomizing the gendered, classed, and raced dimensions of selfhood in consumer society. Each chapter examines an aspect of this overall pattern, showing how Asiatic cholera, phantom limb pain and breast cancer were infused with anxieties about the effect of "progress" on personhood. Recent thinking about Victorian culture contends that the body naturalized hierarchies based on race, gender and class, providing biological justification for the rigid social ordering built into capitalism and global expansion. "Raw Material" complicates these theories and problematizes our use of the "material" as an analytical category by looking at moments when medicine used disease less to express or confirm the social structure than to question the assumptions upon which that structure was founded. Using bodily symptoms to question the relationship between objects and persons--to ask whether persons were objects, whether objects were subjects, and whether there was any essential difference between the two--medicine challenged and reconfigured human "nature" by refracting bodily process through a rhetoric of production. The diseased body's materiality, its palpable presence and inexorable process, was a source of deep ambivalence, the focal point for anxiety and exhilaration about the uncertain and shifting status of humanness in the age of capital.